Movie review: Death-row drama 'Trial' never catches 'Fire'

By Al Alexander/For The Patriot Ledger

Friday

May 17, 2019 at 5:36 AM

The unfortunate legacy of the Oscar-winning “Dead Man Walking” is its rendering of all other death-row stories insignificant, if not useless. But that hasn’t deterred the makers of “Trial by Fire,” although it could be argued that it should have. Imitation is indeed flattery, but not when imitation is this pale.

While watching an overly earnest Laura Dern frantically trying to halt the execution of a wrongly convicted arsonist, I was further reminded of another 1990s classic: Robert Altman’s masterpiece, “The Player.” More specifically the hilarious last-act cameo by Bruce Willis playing a do-gooder rushing toward the gas chamber before an innocent prisoner (Julia Roberts) breathes her last breath. It’s capped by Roberts asking her hunky co-star, “What took you so long?” To which Willis replies, “The traffic was a B.” Apparently the parody was lost upon Edward Zwick, who sets the stage for an eerily similar finale, but, sadly, not for laughs. He’s deadly serious, but you giggle just the same at the audacity of ceding to such hoary clichés.

At least the once great helmsman of films like “Glory” and “Leaving Normal” retains the skill of making it marginally palpable via fine performances by Dern and Jack O’Connell (“Unbroken”) as the wild-eyed innocent the Texas Department of Criminal Justice is determined to exterminate. They keep you invested, but they can’t deter the eye-rolling predictability of a fact-based script by Geoffrey Fletcher (culled from a New Yorker article) struggling mightily to establish a stirring argument against capital punishment.

As written, “Trial by Fire” plays like the kind of made-for-TV movies HBO produced in the 1990s, full of anger and righteous indignity. But where’s the emotion? It’s there at the beginning, as we watch O’Connell’s Cameron Todd Willingham -- a drunk, philandering bottom-feeding dad -- stumbling through his burning house futilely trying to rescue his three toddler daughters from the lapping flames. He’s understandably heartbroken, as are we with memories of the haunting “Manchester by the Sea” dancing in our heads. But the cops, eager to quickly close the case, charge Todd -- as he likes to be called -- with murder. And because he’s a penniless reprobate with a mullet, they make it stick.

So, it’s off to the state pen, where Zwick instantly assigns Todd a bullying, hot-headed corrections officer (Chris Coy from “The Deuce”) who’ll undoubtedly become the inmate’s friend by Act III. That’s followed by the even more familiar glimpses of prison life: the dubious cellmates, the beat downs, the going mad in solitaire and the escalating feelings of loneliness and abandonment. O’Connell is superb at portraying a prisoner’s response to such indignities; and even better at illustrating Todd’s 12-year arc from angry redneck to budding scholar and poet. But Zwick never provides the space for O’Connell to dig deeper. It’s all surface, bordering on rote.

Then, just when you’re ready to walk the green mile yourself, Dern states her case as Liz Gilbert, a Houston-based playwright with two kids and a dying ex-husband. For somewhat muddy reasons, Liz becomes Todd’s pen pal. Eventually, they meet, connect and Liz discovers she suddenly has a purpose: Clearing Todd. Dern wears her character’s unbridled urges and vulnerabilities well, but she’s powerless to alter a succession of paint-by-numbers scenes of Liz glued to her circa 1999 iMac, pouring through legal documents and rousting crucial witnesses, including Todd’s sleazy ex-wife, Stacy (Emily Meade). Frankly, Liz’s kids aren’t the only ones tiring of her samaritanism. It’s exhausting. Ditto Todd’s investment in his beloved Dallas Cowboys, whose famous 1975 “Hail Mary” pass from Roger Staubach to Drew Pearson serves as a metaphor for his rapidly fading hopes.

Come on! Are they serious? All this may well have happen to the real Liz and Todd, but in a movie it borders on cornball, ticking countdown clock and all. Call me cold, but the final moments, as Liz rushes to Todd’s execution, had me laughing, not crying. Zwick shows no shame; and worse, he takes more than two hours to get there. You’re unmoved, neither emotionally nor in your opinion on the death penalty. And when ex-Texas Gov. Rick Perry pops up during the end credits defending his state’s astronomically high execution rate while participating in the 2012 presidential debates, you feel bludgeoned.

Yes, our criminal justice system is biased and corrupt, with the poor and undereducated accounting for 90 percent of the prison population. And no doubt Zwick’s attempt to dramatize it is admirable. But you can’t help wishing his lockstep depiction of capital punishment felt a lot less like a death sentence.